Month: July 2018

Would you believe that you can take a cheap 3D printer and easily convert it into a full function pick and place machine to help assemble your PCBs? No? Well good, because you can’t. A real pick and place needs all kinds of sensors and logic to identify parts, rotate them, make sure everything is aligned, etc, etc. There’s no way you could just bolt all that onto a cheap 3D printer, and let’s not even talk about the lack of closed loop control.

But if you have a very specific use case, namely a PCB that only has a relatively large single part that doesn’t need to be rotated, [Connor Nishijima] might have a solution for you. He bought a $150 USD Monoprice Mini, and with the addition of a few printed parts, was able to build a machine that drastically cuts down the time it takes for him to build his LED boards. Best of all the modification doesn’t involve any permanent changes to the printer, he can just pop off the vacuum attachment when he wants to print something.

The world needs a freely available tool for designing open-source hardware. Without it, designers do not have the freedom to share their work efficiently. KiCad is that tool, and you can help to develop it.

A stable release of KiCad Version 6 could become available very soon, so that everybody can profit from its enhanced features. With an extra 600 hours of expert development, this might become a reality!

Contribute to KiCad Version 6 with a donation and help us reach the goal of 600 hours of expert development that can make the new release available sooner than you think.

The Academy Awards of hardware creation is going on right now! The Hackaday Prize is a challenge to you — yes, you — to create the next great piece of Open Hardware. It is simply incomparable to anything else, and we have the projects to show for it.

We wrapped up the Power Harvesting Challenge portion of The Hackaday Prize. Now we’re happy to announce twenty of those projects have been selected to move onto the final round and have been awarded a $1000 cash prize. Congratulations to the winners of the Power Harvesting Challenge portion of the Hackaday Prize.

Almost a year after the release of KiCad 4.0.7, the KiCad development team is proud to present a new and improved KiCad 5.0 release!

The stable release version 5.0.0 is made from the stable 5.0 branch. KiCad binaries should be available now or in the very near future for download for Windows, macOS and Linux. See the download page for guidance.

We’re still coming off the Hackaday Belgrade conference right now. If you were there, you know it was the greatest hardware conference ever. If you weren’t there, you missed out. Sorry. (Make sure you get in on the Hackaday Superconference in November.)

One of the many highlights of the Belgrade conference was, of course, the badge. The 2018 Hackaday Belgrade Badge is a masterpiece of hardware with a 55-key keyboard, RGB TFT LED, speaker, and a BASIC interpreter.

This badge is a masterpiece of electronic design by Voja Antonic. Just to take one small example from the design, check out the placement of the buttons. Think the slightly rotated buttons that make up the keyboard is only a stylistic choice? It’s not; by carefully rotating each button, the legs of each switch can fit in between each other. It’s brilliant.

We at OSHWA are excited to announce that the OSHWA Certification process has an officially registered trademark. This registration will make it easier for OSHWA to prevent people from using the OSHWA Open Source Hardware Certification logo if they have not actually gone through the certification process. We hope this will give the community more confidence when they see the OSHWA certification logo on hardware out in the world.

Tindie seller Citrus CNC Store is working on a low-cost automatic pick and place feeder and entered it into the robotics challenge. The pick and place machine is a valuable resource for building electronics.

The end goal here is to create a fully featured pick and place machine at a mid-range hobby 3D printer price point, with support for at least 20 automatic tape feeders and loop control of every motion related component. Check out this project on Hackaday.io.

Another Tindie seller who owns the proto-Phi Store is working on a modular design for a soft robotic gripper.

The design is for soft robotics fabrication and emphasizes the molds and subsequent actuators. The current method combines the softness of a silicone actuator and a 3D plastic exoskeleton.